How bees produce honey

How bees produce honey

Absorption of nectar

The nectar is a sugar liquid extracted by the bee from the flowers using its long pipe-like tongue. It is stored in an additional stomach. The nectar mixes with the enzymes that convert The bee visits several flowers to fill the honey sac (extra stomach) before returning to the cell.

Delivery of nectar

The bee returns to the cell, passes the nectar to another bee by mouth, and repeats the process several times until it is finally deposited into the hive. This occurs to convert sucrose found in nectar, which accounts for 20-30% of nectar to glucose and fructose. The glucose enzyme converts a small amount of glucose to gluconic acid, which gives honey its acid taste, and adjusts its acidity, making it unsuitable for microbes to survive bacteria, mildew and fungus, as well as hydrogen peroxide.

Drying honey

The bees keep honey in the cells, but now contain high moisture, the nectar contains 70-80% of the water, and drying bees move wings to form fans to reduce the moisture of honey until it reaches 18-20%, and then put In storage cells, covered with beeswax. It can be stored indefinitely so that the bees provide their food in the cold winter seasons, but the bees are not the only ones to feed on in the winter. The bears, humans and many other organisms attack the cells to obtain the honey that was the main source of desalination in the world before the 16th century , Ie before the sugar is widely spread, it is worth noting that the color of honey, its taste, smell, and texture varies greatly depending on the type of flowers.